Editorial: Pattison was a fine public servant

She was a ground-breaker. She was a maverick. She led Dutchess County during one of the most turbulent times in recent history.

Lucille Pattison, who died Wednesday, is being remembered fondly by those who worked side by side and even across the political aisle when she served as county executive between the late 1970s and early 1990s.

Pattison faced the kind of tests that any county executive does: How to deal with jail overcrowding, road repairs, waste disposal and thousands of other matters, both big and small. But in ways she got more than she bargained for during the late 1980s when the Tawana Brawley scandal rocked Dutchess County - and the nation.

Brawley and her advisers, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, repeatedly claimed six men abducted and raped her in Wappingers Falls when she was 15. Exhaustive investigations and court battles deemed the allegations a hoax, but the damage and racial tension it brought to the region had been done.

As the Poughkeepsie Journal wrote when she was leaving office, "Pattison was the voice of Dutchess in those months. Pattison appeared regularly on television talks shows and in national magazines; her quiet but determined defense of Dutchess's essential decency resounding above the inchoate din of imported anger."

Pattison said she "was feeling my way along and didn't know what to say, but I decided to speak my mind about Dutchess."

She often played to her instincts and was proven right more often that not.

When Pattison was first elected county executive in 1978, she became the first Democrat to run Dutchess County, not to mention the first woman to run any county in the history of New York state.

She vowed to have an administration that would be free from scandal - an unambiguous and critically important promise, considering the fact that her predecessor, Edward Schueler, had just resigned after pleading guilty to accepting a bribe.

Before leaving office, Pattison oversaw construction of a new jail, the last time the county has endeavored to expand these facilities that are overcrowded today, and government services grew in a host of areas. So did, of course, the size of the county budget. But Pattison always put forth what she felt were long-term investments for county government to make - planning for the county's inevitable growth were generally top of mind.

Her perspective will be missed; her commitment to public serve was beyond reproach.

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Editorial: Pattison was a fine public servant

She was a ground-breaker. She was a maverick. She led Dutchess County during one of the most turbulent times in recent history.